Cashflow Copywriting and Marketing

If you ask most small business owners if they’re happy with the number of visitors coming to their website? or

How long were they on their site or,

What action they took?

You could say over 90% wouldn’t have clue, because they have no way of tracking and monitoring their websites. You see out of the 11 websites i review last week only 1 had installed Google Analytics.

Why you install Google Analytics

The blurb from Google Analytics Enterprise-class web analytics made smarter, friendlier and free.

“Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites.”

So 1 out 11 sites  had the tools to analyses their site performance for the rest it just a guess.

Google provides this tool for free so you can understand how your visitors arrive at your site.

• Isolate and analyze subsets of your traffic. Select from predefined custom segments such as “Paid Traffic” and “Visits with Conversions”
• Track sales and conversions. Measure your site engagement goals against: threshhold levels that you define.
• Optimize your AdWords performance with post-click data on your keywords, search queries, match type and more.
• Trace transactions to campaigns and keywords, get loyalty and latency metrics, and identify your best revenue sources.
• Understand visitor intent, find out what your customers are really looking for and speed up time to conversion.

Google Analytics is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters

Here a video by Google http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KK7i084W2w

A brief overview of how to use the Google Analytics interface. If you are new to Google Analytics or you’d like to pick up a few tips on how to use some of the different features, this video is a good place to start

I remember having a discussion with a lady who told me she  was getting 10,000 visitors a month to her jewellery site. The only trouble no one was buying any of her jewellery.

I know it pretty exciting checking your logs on the server and seeing 10,000 visitors per month.

It’s a tragedy if you do all the work to get them to your site, then they just leave and don’t come back. It’s all for nothing

Once we installed Google Analytics, it was pretty obvious where the leakage was occurring. (it’s simply to do, just add a line of code to your website, or if you’re using WordPress, add the code to Google Analytics Plugin)  Most of her visitors were leaving from the same place.

The problem was twofold, her marketing efforts pulled in heaps of people, unfortunately these people were not buyers. It’s a bit like advertising Ferrari cars in an unemployment magazine, they love the cars, but they have no capacity pay for the Ferrari.

You see her marketing attracted people looking for free jewelery, suddenly these people landed on her site and were bombarded with expensive high jewellery ads.

Her marketing was not congruent with her website. She failed the no 1 rule of marketing Give the right message to the right people.

Now may not making a sale no big deal, accept she was buying the traffic from Google Adwords, so for 5 months she been handing over a bag of money to Google, with nothing to show for it.

Google did it’s job, showing her ads to her poorly chosen keywords. Now let’s be clear  Google Adwords is powerful marketing tool, if it’s set up properly. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad, the ultimate direct response marketing tool. Google has a built in defaults ,what you might call a Stupid Tax, unless you know how to fine tunes. Not a game for beginners, as it can cost  you a fortune.  ,

So why was her Google Adwords campaign such an expensive money suck

Her site was confusing and slow to load

All her traffic was sent to her home page, which did not match her marketing message.

Once on the site they had no idea what action to take

Almost impossible to find the Cosmetic Jewellery section of website, so they just left.

Her Google analytics told us, most of the visitors used the term cosmetic jewellery, but site tried to  push Cartier diamonds and other exclusive brands, so most people gave up because they weren’t directed to cosmetic jewelry section when they landed on her site.

It amazes me it took her 5 months to realise, there was something wrong with her website. And If I hadn’t suggested using Google Analytics, she could still be donating money to Google or would of gone broke.

As a direct response copywriter, I know if I can’t measure it then i can’t manage it

Can you afford to waste 5 months wondering how your sites performing . Go over to Google Analytics and set up account http://www.google.com/analytics/

So what’s the lesson here. It’s not how much traffic you get, it’s how it converts to your goals, whether that’s measured in sales or leads.

Don’t let your website suffer from not knowing what’s going on.

Don’t miss Part 3 of lessons learnt from reviewing websites How find your ideal clients

Share your tips for using Google Analytics

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